Podcasts Helps Researchers Locate Words in the Brain

Podcasts, audiobooks, and digital storytelling, in general, have spiked over the last few years, making commute tolerable and helping us evade even if we don’t have a book or movie at hand.

But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were curious what happens in our brains when we listen to podcasts, so they had volunteers listen to stories from “The Moth Radio Hour” while their brain activity was recorded by an fMRI machine.

This experiment has helped them gain insight into the so-called “semantic system” in the human brain. The results could one day be translated into treatments for injuries that affect the ability to speak.

Alex Huth, the study’s lead author and one of the volunteers, listened to more than two hours’ worth of podcast episodes while positioned inside an fMRI machine. This helped him and his team create a map of sorts that shows how words are interpreted in the brain.

“Our subjects love to be in this experiment because they can just lie there and listen to these really interesting stories,” explained Huth.

However, because they kept laughing and destroying fMRI data with their movement, the researchers had to 3-D-print personalized “head cases” for each subject to maintain their heads stable.

The brain’s outer layer of tissue – the cerebral cortex – is known for its role in some of our higher functions, such as language abilities. Thanks to the fMRI recordings, researchers were able to see how this brain area reacted to the storytelling.

But instead of just observing which parts of the brain lit up, they tried to match the active region to particular words that played when that part fired up.

This process allowed researchers to create a map of word clusters linked to activity in various parts of the brain. Unlike previous beliefs, they noticed that both halves of the brain were involved in the semantic system, as over 100 areas in the cerebral cortex had activated during the experiments.

If a word had more meanings or was part of a memory network, more parts of the brain flared up. Take the word ‘dog,’ for example: when we hear it, we automatically envision one, already sense the smell and the feeling of the fur. But we also think about our childhood dog and the memories we have of it.

More than showing which parts of language fall in which region of the brain, the study allowed researchers to focus on a particular area or category of word types to see how they’re processed by the brain.
Image Source: Neurowiki

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Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.